Many drug prescriptions written by physicians require or permit an extended regimen which is necessary for effective patient care. For many prescribed drugs, however, the patient may not obtain the full prescribed number of doses of the drug when he visits the pharmacy. There are many reasons for this. For example, the drug may be perishable. The drug may be expensive, and the patient may prefer to purchase it in smaller quantities in order to spread out the cost. Finally, many drugs such as heart medications are taken over an extended period of time, and it would not be practical to dispense a large number of doses of the drug. For these reasons, among others, prescriptions are often written with a certain number of refills. When the patient runs out of the prescribed drug, he should return to a pharmacy to have his prescription refilled.
Many patients do not fully comply with the specified regimen of taking prescribed drugs. They may, for example, fail to take the drug four times a day when that is prescribed. They may also fail to get a drug prescription refilled when they run out of the medication. The cost to the patient and to society for such negligence is great. Often, the result of failing to take the prescribed medication is a worsened disease with resultant hospitalization. The hospitalization is inevitably more expensive than the cost of the medication which, had it been taken as scheduled, might have prevented the illness.
In addition to the broad public health reasons noted above, pharmacists are concerned about having prescriptions refilled from a simple business point of view. Customers who come into a drugstore to have a prescription refilled are likely also to purchase other items available at a drugstore. Therefore, a method or device which can increase the number of customers returning to have prescriptions refilled is likely also to benefit sales of collateral items.